eMusic reports record holiday sales

Online music retailer eMusic -- which claims the second spot place behind Apple iTunes Store in the ranks of digital music services -- said that it had a banner holiday season for 2007. It surpassed its forecasts by 100 percent end ended the year with more than 400,000 paid subcribers.

On Christmas Day, eMusic counted nearly 500,000 song downloads. It currently has more than three million tracks from more than 20,000 labels -- the largest catalog of independent music available for purchase and download on the Internet, according to the company. Since it started in 2003, eMusic has sold more than 177 million music downloads and about 50,000 audiobooks (audiobooks are a very recent addition to the company's catalog).

eMusic operates on a subscription basis -- users pay a monthly fee, which enables them to download a set number of songs per month, depending on how much they pay. But unlike Windows DRM-based music subscription services like Napster, eMusic sells all of its music in MP3 format, eschewing any sort of Digital Rights Management (DRM) technology, so once you download a song, it's yours to keep, and it works on the Mac, PC, iPod, iPhone and any other MP3-capable device.